Blogs
LGBTQ+ People and the Caravan
11/21/2018
Being LGBTQ and the Caravan With Thanksgiving before us, focusing on the religious pilgrims who sought freedom to practice their religion, and their first harvest meal in October 1621, that we now honor as a nation with a federal holiday. 90 native people and 53 settlers attended the first harvest festival that became our Thanksgiving. In light of this holiday, as a nation we are also aware that more settlers are on the border of California and Mexico, as a caravan of thousands of people ...
Spirit Alive: Thanksgiving 2018-- When a Feast Becomes a Practice
11/19/2018
What the Sikhs Taught Me About Sharing a Meal
"Boy Erased" and the Church
11/14/2018
At the center of the book and movie, “Boy Erased”, written by Garrard Conley, is the so-called conversion or reparative therapy. Conversion or reparative therapy is the dangerous psychological practice of “attempting” to turn a person who self-identifies as LGBTQ to being “straight,” with the underlying misnomer that “straight” is normal and good, and same sex attraction is evil or bad. The 19-year-old college student, Jared (who is really Garrard) is sent to an ex-gay Christian ministry, ...
In Search of a New Home Church for a New Family
11/8/2018
In Search of a New Home Church for a New Family I am writing this blog with a new title in my life: I am a grandpa, or as I am calling myself, “Pops.” My daughter Adrianne and her husband Scott are celebrating the birth of their daughter, Edie! The news of the pregnancy was a note of coming attractions. The actual arrival of the child gave “birth” a whole new and dramatic shift in the tectonic plates of my family’s life. Upon Edie’s delivery into this world, new titles “birthed” too. The next ...
Spirit Alive: Which is More Important, Being Correct...or Learning How to Connect?
11/8/2018
November 6, 2018 With Heart, Soul, and Mind: What's at the Heart of Christian Discipleship? "Teacher, which commandment of the law is the greatest?" Matthew 22: 36 "Evil is always complex, roundabout, tangled. Goodness is always a reduction of life to simplicity....All great discoveries are a reduction from complexity to simplicity....Life for the Pharisee was very complicated. For Jesus it was very simple. The Pharisees lived by innumerable taboos, regulations, and laws. Jesus reduced these ...
Lessons from the Life of Mathew Shepard
10/31/2018
Lessons from the Life of Matthew Shepard In 1998, outside of Laramie, Wyoming, two men—Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson— beat up and robbed Matthew Shepard, a 21-year-old college student who happened to be gay. Matthew was pistol whipped and left for dead for 18 hours, tied up to a fence on a remote Wyoming prairie outside of Laramie. He died five days later without regaining consciousness. For two decades, Shepard’s parents—Judith and Dennis—kept their son’s ashes near their home in ...
